Old Metairie

1.

I made a rose garden for my mother.

Redolent old roses blooming against a weathered low brick wall. (Perhaps I'd say the bricks were from a once-fine country home, now crumbling against crape myrtle, or perhaps I’d say from some eighteenth-century church, fallen into disuse in an unsavory area in the heart of the parish.) Such care I took throughout that spring and early summer, steeping myself in the history of Chinas, Teas, Albas, Gallicas, Bourbons, Noisettes. Reading about botanists who brought back cuttings from China, prizewinning rosarians who could trace the ancestry of their present best rose back to the jardins of the Empress Josephine. I learned to decipher the tiny notations in the antique-rose catalogues I kept by my bed, signifying scent, hue, hips, remontancy-a lovely, lingering word meaning to flower again, meaning possessed of a second chance to bloom.

Sometimes, immersed in my invention, my hands would move as if handling real flowers, and I would arrange in the air bouquets of the old roses, clustering near-chocolate mauves, ecrus like faded parchment, dusty pinks, creamy whites, until I could almost see them. Until I sometimes actually walked out my back screened door into the oppressive, steamy coastal Louisiana heat, expecting to find that brick wall, the dark thick foliage, those abundant fragrant flowers.

All this was background, of course, me soaking myself in the subject until I had the right small details (casual as a pencil sketch on a paper napkin) to set the scene. The scene I hoped my mother imagined me, Ella, her younger and now only daughter, to inhabit. Me, once dismissed as difficult (mule-headed), wayward, willful, now, by default, back in her contingent, if not entirely good, graces, composing a conciliatory letter home.

Often, I would make mention of some favorite linen skirt or dress. Linen, as evocative a word as roses. Whereas, in fact, the last actual linen garment I'd worn had been the black button-front dress I'd stolen for my sister Terrell's memorial service. Even at the time (stunned almost to bruising by the unexpected loss), I was unable, looking at the appalling catchall contents of my own closet, to bear the thought of my mother saying: “How could you show up looking like that, at your own sister's funeral?”

My actual life here in Old Metairie didn't get a mention. If I hadn't ended up destitute, as my parents predicted when I ran away to get married ("throwing your life away on a worthless boy who is never going to amount"), still, the house I occupied half of on the scruffy, run-down, not yet gentrified fringes of a safe, secluded resaca of a neighborhood was not something to write home about. Considering that it sat on an unpaved service road which ran along a railroad track and a bayou and dead-ended on the only through street in the area, one that allowed access by vagrants, thieves, and the rest of the working world. The reason I stayed put and paid the killing property taxes? So that my daughter, Birdie, could attend the local school, fairly good and uncrowded, since most of the local children, naturally, were sent to private schools.

At the moment, pen in hand, I was sitting in the kitchen at the back of the house, mouthing Dear Mother, Dear Mother, and looking out at my actual yard, a scrap of high grass partially shaded by the branches of a neighbor's sagging willow and by our own overgrown oleander (whose leaves were purported to be poisonous to children and animals). There was a little pea-gravel square that must once have been the start of a patio, and now was at least a place where, in cool, less steamy weather, my daughter and a friend could get away from me, or I could sit with this realtor guy who sometimes came around. I recalled reading some book in which the old woman (a char lady?) stayed in the unheated house all day long, only lighting the grate fire in the evening when her husband was due. They found her cold in her cold house. I was not really sweltering here in my shorts and T-shirt with no bra, my oak-brown hair pulled up on my head with a bandana, waiting until my daughter came home from her class to turn on the frigid, clammy window AC unit. It was just that the sound of the motor running seemed to me the sound of dollars disappearing. Most days when I was home, I made do with the ceiling fan and a glass of iced coffee. Besides, it hardly did to complain about the stultifying Gulf Coast humidity (the way sweat stood on your arms and legs as if you'd come from a shower, the way you breathed damp air as if in a steam bath), knowing that Texas had been in the grip of a dreadful, unrelenting, baking drought for a hundred days already. Hard for me, gone so long, to imagine: I always saw my mother in her own cultivated garden, ablaze with pink and red azaleas.

Buddy, my sometime husband, got it in his mind that my folks thought he was no good because he got me to run off, but the truth more likely was that I ran off with him because my folks thought he was no good. At any rate, I owed him forever for getting me out of their house, away from Texas, on my own two feet. He'd made what living he made repossessing yachts for a repo outfit that operated out of Florida. Sometimes he got a windfall; sometimes he lost our shirts. I did nothing, which is what I knew how to do, and waited for him to show up again, to fall into bed with me again. One day a woman whose yacht he'd snatched asked him did he know someone could water her houseplants while she got out of town for a spell. He told her that was my specialty. "She's trained in horticulture," he said. At that time the only plant I'd ever watered had been a runty ruby begonia I'd drowned. From such beginnings came careers.

His bad end had some upside. The last time he left me, he left me pregnant, for which I still gave daily thanks. And, since he never bothered to dissolve our legal entanglement, he also left me with an insurance policy that let me buy this elderly duplex and get my Chevy overhauled. News of his death out in the Gulf aboard someone's delinquent sailboat came to me not by way of his mother, who might have forgotten my name, but from the woman he'd been living with, who thought he might have gone back home. The whole thing was sad, including what felt like everyone's relief. My daughter Birdie could say that her daddy was dead, instead of that she never saw him and didn't know him from Adam. And my mother could discreetly recast me as a "young widow from Louisiana," or so my sister had reported. Mostly I hated his being gone because even now I would probably be holding a crumb of hope that one day he, Buddy Marshall, might blow back in along with the summer's first hurricane and decide he’d like to stick around and get to know his family.

Earlier today, my mind a blank, I'd gone to find a new rose to tell Mother about. Old Metairie, steamy and sunken and surrounded by waters (the Mississippi, Lake Pontchartrain, the squalling Gulf), was infatuated with old roses. I could have asked most anyone. Some of the homes where I plant-tended had rose arbors and shrubs on their grounds, past reflecting pools and pebbled paths. But I would never have asked one of the women who hired me; I was just another of the several helpers who came in when they fled the stifling summer heat, taking off for the mountains, to Europe, to the rocky coast of Maine: house sitter, pet sitter, plant sitter, security service. My favorite source was Henry (Henri), the head rose gardener at Belle Vue, a stately mansion with a series of lavish old gardens through which strolled peacocks and in the branches of whose trees songbirds made their nests. For a nominal fee, the grounds were open to the public, including me. He always had something for me, and, in return, I offered a pair of ears into which he could pour the story of his family's centuries in France, the likelihood that a great-great-grandfather had been gardener to the Empress Josephine.

Today he'd told me how the rose fanciers were bringing him their summer finds, something they spotted up a dirt road outside Shreveport, something growing on the wooden side of an AME church in Tuscaloosa. "Everybody thinks they have an Old Blush," he said, shaking his sunbaked face to indicate they usually didn't. I told him I was looking for something new. "Just got this in from England." He showed me a nearly perfect quartered rose, deep pink to fading palest pink. It didn't smell like tea (like the Teas) or banana (like the Chinas); it smelled—well, like a rose. "It came out of Hamburg when that was part of Denmark, an Alba bred with a Damask, likely. The Brits call it Queen of Denmark. I don't know what the Danes call it." We laughed. Queen of England? He touched the blue-green leaves. "Flourishes anywhere."

The very first time I stopped to talk to Henry, and to watch him prune, clip, pinch faded blooms, he showed me one of his prizes, the Natchitoches Noisette, which had been grown from a clipping found near an old fort that went back to the 1700s. Its cupped pink flowers smelled, he said, of myrrh. I was enchanted: who had an inkling of the odor of myrrh? I went straight home and wrote of the rose to my mother-and that was the beginning of my correspondence garden.

Did she visualize rosebushes against a wall? Did she repeat their names? Did the thought of them take her back to her girlhood in East Texas, not unlike our part of Louisiana? Or did I only hope that at the least she was not sorry to receive my letters?

In January, in a blustery wind the week after the funeral, I'd bought a box of heavy notepaper at the Belle Vue gift shop. Soon, I would need another. Getting out a sheet, I saw that my hands were so damp I'd be bound to smudge the ink. I wiped them, and then, giving in, turned the window unit to high to dry myself, cool myself, enough to write. First lifting my arms over my head to dry the undersides, then leaning over to get the back of my neck. I held a cube of ice to my cheek. Dear Mother, Dear Mother. The sweating wasn't only from the heat. Part of it was from the effort of dissembling, at the age of forty-three, as if I were a child of ten lying about her friends, her grades, what her teacher said.

Dear Mother,

I worry about you and Daddy in the dreadful heat. I hope you are managing. And what of your poor yard?

My roses all flourish in our heat (even if we don't) because they get plenty of moisture and the nights are cool. I have added a new rose, over against the west wall, where there was a break in the bricks and where the soil seemed a little thin, an English hybrid called Queen of Denmark. Silk-soft, pale pink, it perfumes the air wherever planted.

Did I mention to you I got a spot on my favorite linen dress? An ivory Moygashel with a square neck and gored skirt. I used a bit of soap and cold water, and hope to be able to wear it to White Linen Night. This is a fund-raising event for all the Old Metairie garden clubs, and a very nice social evening to which a young widow like myself can feel comfortable going alone.

Birdie-as I believe I told you Robin is calling herself-is taking cello lessons this summer. Such a good thing, for a girl to have a musical proficiency.

Please take care of yourself and Daddy.

Love,
Ella


one violet lane
old metairie

2.

I was on my way to take a shower when the phone rang. "Hello," I said, trying to sound upbeat. Every call was a potential job.

"Guten Tag."

Daddy. My daddy. "Hi," I answered, trying not to choke on the word. This was an old routine. Daddy and Mother, on some trip abroad, had found a card in a hotel room translating Good Morning into French, German, and English: Bonjour, Guten Tag, Hi. They'd thought that a good joke and shared it with my sister and me. A half century it seemed ago, when the world was young. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand.

Maybe he was doing the same. Families weren't supposed to divorce one another.

"Your mother-," he began, then coughed a bit, cleared his throat.
"-How is Mother doing?" I blew my nose.


"She wants you to come for her birthday. You and-" He coughed again.

"Birdie," I reminded him, the new name my daughter had adopted. What her daddy had called her, when he had. I'd mentioned it in January, but how could it have registered at such a time? Robin, her given name, was what my sister
had longed to be called-a movie-star name, she’d said, a fashion-model name. She'd never liked hers, Terrell. In school her teachers had thought it a boy's name or called her Terry. Her married name, Terrell Hall, she claimed, sounded like a freshman dorm. I'd given her my daughter's name as a gift, but by then it hadn't mattered.

"She has it in her mind, your mother, to have all her grandchildren together for the occasion. It's been a spell, a long spell it seems to me, since we had a proper celebration."

"Daddy," I protested, "that's only two weeks away. I can't leave my watering jobs. And trying to get a ticket this late-"

The trip back for the funeral had been a nightmare: the absence of Terrell everywhere. Mother barely speaking, Daddy broken-down weeping, my sister's husband and her big boys walking stiff and stunned in their dark suits. Sleeping again in the double room I'd once shared upstairs had been claustrophobic. Passing out coffee after the service, the trivial had blurred with the tragic: I musn't spill anything on the black button-front dress I'd pilfered; my sister would never be back.

"I wouldn't want you to pay for the tickets," my daddy said. "You can't have an easy time of it, a woman on her own." He sounded genuinely worried, as if he'd just learned I'd been thrown out on the street.

"Really, I couldn't-"I tried to think. For the funeral, I'd driven most of the night to get there; Birdie and I had slept in the car and cleaned up at a hickory-smoked-hamburger stand on the outskirts of Austin. I couldn't do that again. But even with free tickets, it cost money to travel. July and August were my busiest times of the year; I couldn't cancel a job. And what would I wear? Where were the linen dresses of my letters?

Where indeed.

"That's my present to your mother. Getting all the young ones here." Daddy cleared his throat again. I could imagine him, stooped, as very tall men became, thinning white hair and beard, probably wearing a dress shirt and vest even in the house, professor's clothes, to make the call. "You had a good visit with your sister last year at this time, of which we got a full report. But your mother and I are behind in our catching up. When you were here for the-for her-" His voice caught.

"We'll come," I told him. "Of course."

Off the phone, in the muggy, chilly, air-cooled kitchen, I made myself a glass of iced coffee, the leftover breakfast brew. I looked in my closet and quickly shut the door. I decided to wash my hair in the shower and then comb it out, see how bad the ends were and how shapeless the mane. "Can't you do something with that hair, dear?" had been a refrain of my mother's all the time I lived at home. Maybe Buddy taking it in his hands, burying his face in it, saying, "Don't ever cut this stuff, hear me, you've got million-dollar hair," was all it took for me to pack my bag and run away.

However, Daddy's invitation raised a problem more serious than either my strapped finances or my frazzled appearance: the matter of my sister Terrell's purported visit to see me last summer in Old Metairie. She had called me, at first I thought just to say hello, about a year ago, shortly after the Fourth, to say she was telling them all-Mom and Dad and Rufus, her husband-that she was coming to see me, that she meant to get back in touch with her baby sister Ella. But that she wasn't really making a trip to see me. That she had a man. "You musn't think bad things about me. We're head over heels in love and I never ever had that before, the way you did with Buddy. He makes me feel so young; I'm out of my mind." They had been trying to get together for just about absolutely forever, she said, and now at last they'd arranged this weekend to New Orleans. Did I think she was just awful?

"Who is he?" I'd asked, not wanting a name, just wanting some clue, I guess, of how come she'd picked him. It made me nervous, and more than a little bit sad, to hear about her doing this. I still thought of her husband, back when he was just a law student called Red, as the one friend I’d had before I left home. He used to confide to me how crazy about Terrell he was and I used to confess to him how bad I wanted to get out of there, that house and family that he was wanting so much to marry into.

"I won't tell you his name, Ella. Then you can't let anything slip. But I can tell you this much, he comes from the very same county Daddy does, Ector County, from a little town called Notrees. I'm not kidding. I guess that's what got me first, that West Texas twang. He says where he grew up is a sort of desert with old meteor craters and no oil. Though everybody out there has to tell you they haven't got producing wells on their place. He and his daddy grow beef and now they're farming emus, which are just like overgrown chickens, he says. He says they raise them for leather, but then they have to use the leather for gloves and chaps to keep the birds from ripping an arm or leg off with those toenails.

"We met on a sailing weekend, and right away as soon as I saw him, I just about went out of my mind over him. I wasn't looking or anything, but, between us, privately, things haven't been all that great at home. Now that Rufus has quit the law firm, he's sort of gone crazy on me. You don't know how that is, because, well, Buddy wasn't, you know, in the mainstream to begin with. But when middle-aged men change their spots, if you get what I mean, it's like they just turn into somebody else overnight. We hardly have one word to say anymore, and the boys don't know what's going on. So, anyway, it's taken me and Mr. Emu, I'll call him, nearly forever to get together, but we've finally got it all planned. You have to promise me you'll never ever tell, no matter what-"

I'd done my best to stay in touch with Terrell over the years. After all, your sisters or brothers, whoever you had, were the people who went down the same road with you all the way. You came into your parents' lives after things had already happened; the people they'd once been were gone and the people they were you couldn't really know. And it must be the same with your children. You were already set when they showed up, you were opaque to them, they were in another time zone from you. But siblings, they were on the same boat, in the same car, skating down the same sidewalk from the start.

"Cross my heart," I said. Not really warm about my role in this-I wasn't into lying about someone else's life on top of my own. But I asked, "What do you want me to do?" Trying to figure out if I was going to get to see her at all. It had been four years then since I'd last been home.

"You'll have to send me a picture of your place, you know, and tell me something about the house I can pass on to Mom, who'll want to hear everything. And make up some stuff we went to see, so I can tell her and Dad, and Rufus and the boys. And maybe something about Robin?"

"She's calling herself Birdie now," I mentioned. "She's learning to play the cello." That being the one true thing I always told. "Look," I said, "why don't I meet you at the airport? I could bring photos of my place and Birdie, and we could get someone to take a shot of us together?" I hesitated, then said it straight out, "Hey, I'd like to see you."

Terrell said she just couldn't. "We've only got two nights. We're flying in together and we'll be lucky if we can wait till we get to the hotel.”

"Sure, okay." I understood. Still, I was disappointed. "It's just—been a long time, Ter."

"I know, I'm sorry. Honestly. I get so busy and it seems like we have people from West Texas and the Hill Country coming to the lake every weekend to sail. Just to see water. You have no idea what this drought has been like."

At first I thought maybe she didn't want me to see this guy from Notrees. That she might be keeping him from me, since I was more available, being single. You get this between sisters, sometimes, worry about the competition. Buddy had actually first started hanging around the house trying to get a date with her, before he and I got a lot of chemistry going, a lot of heat. Luckily, she didn't go for the futureless type. And Red and I, her present husband Rufus and I, used to go out for hamburgers when she wasn't home and talk about was she ever going to marry him or not, and talk about how could I leave home without finishing school or knowing how to do anything.

But after I got off the phone, I'd realized that the fact was she didn't want him, this Mr. Emu, to see me. Didn't want to be embarrassed by her tatty younger sister. If she'd gone up a notch in her marriage from where we came from (the history professor daddy and the gardening mother), then I'd gone down a notch or two in my scrambling solo life. I could see that one of the advantages of a secret lover was that he didn't have to meet your kin.

So I did exactly what she asked for. In the same manner that I now wrote letters to my mother, practically coming to believe them myself, so I carefully built up all the details of a wonderful weekend reunion with my sister Terrell. I sent her photos to show around of "my" pink-painted cottage on one of Old Metairie's nicest magnolia-shaded streets, the sort of house-with white picket fence, white shutters on the floor-to-ceiling windows, pots of waxy white Cape jasmine by the door-to which my mother could point with pride. The sort of home, classy but not large, dear but not overpriced, in which a sociable young widow might live a pleasant life in the Deep South. I wrote describing a late supper in a French restaurant called the Pink Cafe, where I had never eaten; early communion at the old Episcopal church, because Mother loved old churches, modeled stone by stone after St. Bartolph's in Cambridge, England, that I often drove by; and a benefit high tea in the rose gardens at historic Belle Vue, whose grounds I did know well.

I constructed that weekend never dreaming that I would be called upon to repeat the story again and again at my sister's funeral. That I would have to recount to everyone where we went, what we saw, our breakfasts of fresh strawberries and cream on my pink patio, looking out at my walled summer garden.

Telling all this to her husband had been the very worst. My parents were too stunned, too staggered by their grief, to be able to listen for long. My mother had to hold herself together, straight and composed, for her daughter's friends; my daddy had to make coffee and apple kuchen for the remnants of family. But my old friend Red was someone I had never lied to, was the one person in my past I could always come to with the whole (unsavory, shocking, or ordinary) truth. And he was the one who seemed to hang on my words. No longer the law student I remembered, with horn-rim glasses, shaggy dark hair, white shirts with the sleeves rolled up above his elbows, corduroy pants, usually with a casebook under his arm, as if to prove he was what he claimed to be. He still sat, intent, the way he used to, leaning forward, his forearms on his knees, but now in a well-tailored black suit, good shoes, an expensive haircut, discreet contact lenses. His once-tanned face had been blanched with shock and his once-voluble conversation muted, but, still, after his subdued greeting, "Hello, Ella," he'd stayed close, listening while I retold the tale of the weekend reunion in Old Metairie. Hearing my daddy lean down and say, "I'm glad you daughters had a get-together." His eyes wet. Hearing my mother, wearing winter white, the mourning of another era, say to a friend, her voice shaking slightly, "The girls had such a nice visit, only last summer."

And all the time wondering what my sister had told them. And wondering, too, if anyone else knew who she'd been going to see that bitter January when her little chartered Piper Cherokee went down in the sleet.

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Excerpted from Ella in Bloom by Shelby Hearon Copyright 2001 by Shelby Hearon. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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